Come to my thing tonight ^^^^
Here's a few pages from the book to whet your drinking boner.
What is a dive bar?
A dive bar is a series of contradictions. It's usually an objectively bad bar in terms of service, product, and décor, but it's also the best bar you know. It's a place where you might recognize all the regulars, but one where you can drink in piece and blend into the scenery without anyone casting judgment.
A dive bar can simultaneously be the regular haunt of college-age kids getting their first taste of the drinking world as well as the old-timers who've spent fifty years in the same stool. It's a bar colored by the demographics of the neighborhood it's in, particularly in the still relatively segregated but rapidly gentrifying parts of Boston, but also a place where certain time-honored traditions hold fast. A dive is a bar where literally anything and everything can happen on any given night, but more often than not the predictable patterns of inertia rule.
Over the course of the past year I spent researching this book (getting drunk, in other words), I found roughly 120 different bars that fit that description. We've had to omit some of them for space, but an equal number of them have closed since I began. That's a pattern that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon as real estate prices continue to climb, and many of the people who built these bars, either literally, or through their decades-long patronage, die off or are priced out of the neighborhoods. I wouldn't be surprised if a few more included here have gone under while this book goes to print. That's emblematic of the biggest contradiction that a dive embodies: it's a bar that has somehow withstood the test of time, but isn't long for the changing world.
A few bar excerpts after the jump:
Sligo Pub, 237 Elm St., Somerville.
There are plenty of bars in Boston named after authors, Bukowski Tavern, Flan O'Brien's and The Brendan Behan for example. And with the proliferation of bar stool scribblers in this city – souls poisoned by poetry and whiskey alike – it's not surprising to find plenty of fictional characters named after bars as well. Write what you know, right?
With the ear for drinkers patois that Boston-based author Steve Almond has shown in story collections like “My Life in Heavy Metal” it's no surprise that the man knows his way around a dive or two. I asked him about his dive of choice for processing the fuel of pint to pen.
“My favorite was the Sligo, just outside Davis Square,” he told me. The Sligo, like nearly everything else in town takes its name from an area in Ireland. “All the young pretties wound up at the Burren,” the warehouse-sized Irish bar around the corner, “but the Sligo was where the serious alcoholics hung their tongues. It smelled like dead animals and accepted only cash, both qualities I find admirable in a dive.” He's dead on about the smell. McKinnon's Meat Market is next door.
“I wound up writing a whole bunch of short stories starring a drunk named Sligo,” Almond told me. He's a memorable character, equal parts boozy bluster and post-intellectual hard ass. Sligo, “had the manner of a man who'd just pulled an all-nighter at Caesar's Palace and walked into the dawn dead broke,” reads one description in the story “What Were the Sophists.” “He was a vicious smoker; already his voice sounded like a hedge trimmer.”
You might uncover more than a few suspects matching that description at the Sligo. I'm not sure if this will disappoint Almond to hear, however, but these days, alongside those rugged types on a packed weekend night the place is absolutely rotten, (or fresh would make more sense I suppose), with young ladies. Here, like many dives, you get to see the circle of life metaphor reenacted anew each day as night comes and the old give up their space for the young. Good to see a few haggard soldiers tough it out amidst the crowd of kids though, remaining utterly indifferent to the flirtatious playacting going on around them. Everything they're interested in is stacked in rows on the other side of the bar anyway.
It's a truly curious place, and an odd match for the neighborhood. Davis Square is one of the younger, hipper areas of Somerville. The type of neighborhood an alien who's never been to Earth but has recently been introduced to the concept of counter-culture lesbians and read a few months worth of the local arts weekly would dream up if asked to describe an American city.
But the Sligo persists. Dive bars are like wounds on the body of the city, and patrons are like white blood cells flooding to the spot to fix it. Big crowds of drinkers breathe a bar back into health, sometimes leading to the type of gentrified renovations that cover up any evidence that the wound existed in the first place. But cut off that blood supply and it hardens into a crooked scar. In other words an unpopular dive remains a dive. Run a popular one and the owners start getting ideas. A steady influx of renewable college age drinkers hasn't had that healing effect on the Sligo however. The scar, as it were, remains. Sometimes literally. In fact many of the surfaces inside the long, narrow, cramped room are marked by years of amateur woodworking. Trace your fingers along the markings and you could read the lines like some liquored-up brail narrative. This one is filled with characters.
Paddy's Lunch, 260 Walden St., Cambridge. .
A small residential building in a quiet residential neighborhood doesn't seem a likely location for a bar. Maybe a busy little laundromat, or a poorly stocked bodega, but a bar? One that's been there for over seventy five years? A quick scan of the brightly lit room on a crowded Saturday night, where the crowd has thrown their coats on all the tables and the backs of all the chairs chairs so a newcomer has to stand in the middle of the room like an asshole, and it all begins to make sense. It's more like a family get together than a place of business.
“In 1934 my grandfather started it,” owner Ruth Allen tells me. “Patrick Fennell. They called him Paddy. He got laid off from the Boston elevated, the old MBTA, and my grandmother actually ran it from the forties and fifties until she died in 1960. Then my mum ran it from then until about ten years ago, and I've had it since then. It's considered a men's bar, but it's run by women that's the funny part.”
“Back then my grandmother would stop serving the guys between twelve and one, and she'd turn on the rosary. Everyone knew that they'd better get their beer before twelve or else they wouldn't have one.”
The neighborhood has gone through ebbs and tides over the decades, she says. In the fifties through seventies it was still a middle class stronghold here. “Paddy's was looked at by the neighborhood as the place you went to talk to people that knew your parents and grandparents. In the sixties and seventies, the neighborhood kind of looked down on Paddy's – the people who were buying the houses, the professors and stuff. But there was a group of professors who came from the middle class who took pride in Paddy's because it was a place that they felt comfortable.”
Eventually her parents started having political events at the bar. Long time Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil used to play cards in the back room with Judge Sullivan in the back of Paddy's. John Kennedy came in when he was running. Joe Kennedy too, on a tour of places where his uncle started. “We had the true Kennedy political machine here. Then they started saying 'What a great place, it's just like regular people.' We were like 'Yeah, well, we don't think of it as a place with regular people!'
The nineties were tough, with a lot of people purchasing homes in the neighborhood to resell them. Paddy's was a respite for the ones who were left, at which point it became almost like a private club, she says. That explains the less than welcoming reception I got. I don't blame them though. Who am I anyway? “It was always sort of like, why are you here sort of thing?” she says. You've got to earn your spot at the bar.
My friend Jennifer felt intimidated by the demeanor when she first moved into the area. "We were so excited to have a local pub across the street and we thought we'd go all the time,” she tells me. “As soon as we mentioned the name Paddy's to people their response was consistently 'Don't go there! You have to know someone to get in.'”
“It took nearly a year and a half before we had the courage to venture in without knowing a soul. To our surprise we had a great time. The bartenders and regulars have got to be some of the nicest people we've met in Cambridge.”
Friends and being nice don't necessarily pay the bills though. It's hard to keep a place like this in business these days. “We were lucky that my parents bought the place when they did otherwise we wouldn't be here anymore,” Ruth says. She just raised the price of a beer from $3 to $3.50 and there was an uproar. It wouldn't be family in Massachusetts if there weren't a little in-fighting though.
The Eagle, 520 Tremont St., Boston.
Since the mid nineteenth century, when many of the five story redbrick row houses that line the streets of the South End were being built, this has been a neighborhood in flux. As the twentieth century dawned, and newer neighborhoods like the Back Bay became more fashionable, the South End began to be populated by middle-class black families and large numbers of immigrants, a sense of relative diversity that persists to this day despite the area's recent development into one of the more fashionable restaurant and art districts in the city. There were long stretches of time however, where the South End was a troubled neighborhood, and for many, an undesirable place to live. After World War II, as is the always the case, fringe populations like artists, gays and lesbians and bohemians recognized the South End's potential and began what has become by now a familiar process of rejuvenation: marginalized progressive groups move in, fashionable middle class soon follow, and eventually property values are driven up so high that no one but the wealthy can live there.
I mention that in respect to the Eagle, because as one of Boston's last remaining true gay bars, and one of the only gay dives at all, its three decades at the center of this politically, and fashionably charged areas is remarkable, and the trends one traces through the history of gay bars in Boston are relevant to the ways dive bars have been elbowed aside over the years for higher end, more “respectable” businesses. In the 1990s there were about 16 gay bars in Boston. Now there are roughly 7. Dive bars like the ones covered in this book have faired even worse. The whitewashing of neighborhoods like the South End is part of a much larger trend sweeping throughout cities like Boston in general. First the gay bars, then the dive bars are dislocated. Then the independent book stores and marginal ethnic restaurants and other speciality shops go next.
Roger has been bartending at The Eagle through much of that evolution. He's been here since 1981 when they opened their doors.
“This area was so gay in the seventies and eighties,” he says. “Back then you would see a lot of guys walking down the streets holding hands. Now all you see is baby strollers and yuppies.” This was a very skeevy area back then, he says. “No one wanted to come here except the gays, who came because it was so cheap.
Today the Eagle, unlike many of the gay bars throughout the country that share the name, isn't much of a leather bar. But it's still a notorious spot for cruising, particularly late at night. “The Eagle is called the Dirty Bird and is frequently seen as the last chance hook up bar at 1:30. It is a meat market and at 2 you will see the best sidewalk sale in Boston,” says Kelly, a sommelier at a decidedly non-divey restaurant nearby. Michael Brodeur, my editor at the Boston Globe says it's a poor example of the Eagle name. “Unfriendly barkeep, stale atmosphere, bad music. So sad, but she has to want to help herself to get better."
I found the room welcoming, if dingy and a bit downtrodden. Good dive qualities. Roger was extraordinarily helpful and friendly. The high tin ceilings are littered with all manner of flags and banners – sports teams, country flags, gay men's clubs' colors – and the walls are covered with wooden eagle statues and stuffed animal heads. It looks like the type of haunted house theme park attraction where you'd expect everything to spring to life like clockwork and scare the shit out of you.
Back when he first lived in the neighborhood you could rent an apartment nearby on the cheap, Roger says. He lived upstairs from the bar for sixteen years. “That's how bad the neighborhood was, you couldn't even rent these beautiful apartments.” Doesn't seem to be a problem renting them anymore. It's just a different class of people now. That's a little scary too.
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5 comments:
That's emblematic of the biggest contradiction that a dive embodies: it's a bar that has somehow withstood the test of time, but isn't long for the changing world.
Great summation of the situation most dives face today, especially in bigger cities. Luckily, here in Nowheresville we don't seem to have that problem. I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing!
I'll get there if it rains enough. Got longstanding outdoor plans.
Getting ready for the harvest?
Thanks TheCHief. Appreciated.
How many times did you get dosed with date rape drug during your research? I know of at least one. Remember? No? Perfect!
I wish.
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